Here, ghostie ghostie ghostie
by Dream Theme
Summary: When 2 FBI agents show up asking Danny all sorts of questions, things get real weird real fast. And that's by Amity Park's standards.


The new people in town didn't bother Danny. They had come in their suits and an old car asking questions about the neighbour's death. It seemed a bit strange that the FBI would send a couple of their agents for something so small as a death (however unusual it had been), but Danny decided that it wasn't for him to judge. He knew what had caused Mrs Gomer's death and had dealt with it. Some low-level ghost had escaped the portal while Danny had been at school. He had come home to some strange noises coming from the old woman's house. Entering her house hadn't been a problem, seeing as he could go ghost and walk through walls. The sight that had awaited him had almost made him throw up. Almost. However, being ghost meant that he couldn't.

Mrs Gomer was all over the walls and ceiling. He could see an eye dangling from a hook on the wall where a picture once hung. He stepped in something squishy and when he looked down, he was greeted with a bit of something that could have been liver or brain. He wasn't sure which. The old woman was certainly not his first death in his 2 years as a halfa, but she was certainly the most gruesome. He quickly looked away, looking for the ghost he knew was somewhere in the house. The cold feeling he got while near one increased as he headed upstairs. The ghost had seemed to make its temporary home in the bathroom, every so often emitting a noise of joy. Before the disgusting octopus thing even knew it, Danny had shot it with his ecto-blast and caught it in the thermos. He went back downstairs, careful to not look too carefully at his surroundings in the lounge, and went back home. Sickened, he placed the thermos in the lab - he would think of a suitable punishment for the thing when he got back - before going back next door, this time as a human. He bust the front door open and rang the cops, careful to make himself sound scared and ill.

The FBI had asked the same questions as the cops did. What were you doing there? What kind of sounds did you hear? Was there anything unusual about the death? Danny had almost laughed at the last one. You mean apart from the way she was all over the room? The shorter of the two nodded slightly, as though conceding defeat. They had spent an hour going over what Danny had seen or heard before leaving, not in the slightest bit suspicious as to Danny's secret life.

The day after the FBI had come found him and his two closest friends, Sam and Tucker, in the Nasty Burger. They were discussing the punishment for the octopus ghost and what would be suitable. It was still stuck in the thermos 2 days after the murder, and they were still no closer to coming to a conclusion.

"We could always send it to Walker. He'd know what to do."

"Walker would throw me in with it. If he even threw it in, in the first place. He doesn't care what the ghosts do as soon as they're in our dimension."

"Oh."

"What about just leaving the nasty thing in the thermos?"

"I don't think that's punishment enough."

It carried on like this until the two FBI agents walked in. Danny quieted his two friends as the men got close to them and sat at the table beside theirs, effectively stopping their ghostly conversation all together. To fill the silence, they spoke about school work (have you done that essay for Lancer yet?) and the latest gossip (did you hear that Paulina and Gary are together?), until the agents began talking about something that caught Danny's interest. Sam and Tucker were arguing over some math work they had been set, so Danny tuned them out to listen.

"Could it have been that ghost kid?" The shorter of the two asked in between mouthfuls of burger, "what do they call him, Danny Phantom?" The tall one didn't even glance up from the laptop screen when he answered.

"I dunno. The people here think of him as a hero. I mean, look at this," he turned the laptop around to face the other, though Danny couldn't see what was on the screen thanks to Tucker's hat. "'Phantom saves the day', 'Boo hoo! Local ghost boy makes ghosts cry.'?" They were all newspaper headlines from the local paper. Those people really needed to come up with better headlines.

"He's gotta be connected to it though."

"Maybe, but we shouldn't jump to conclusions." He spun the laptop back around to him again. "I think we should look at other options before we try to gank the kid."

"Whatever."

Danny was about to open his mouth to stop his friends from arguing, when his ghost breath alerted him to trouble. He groaned and tried getting their attention.

"Guys?" Their bickering continued, so he tried again, louder.

"Guys!"

"What?" Their voices came in unison.

"We need to get going." He said jumping to his feet. The others followed, immediately understanding the urgency. The three ran into the alley next to the building, making sure they were out of sight before Danny changed. The fact that night had fallen helped his desire to stay hidden. The familiar rings ran up and down his body, rearranging his molecules. Tucker pulled out a thermos from his bag and Danny flew into the air, following his ghost sense and trusting his two friends to follow him. A scream sounded from the direction they were headed and Danny flew faster, desperately trying to get there on time. It took all of 30 seconds to get to the right place, but they were too late. The small octopus ghost that should have been in the thermos in the lab, was free and had killed another person. Their remains were just as gruesome as the Mrs Gomer's, only this time, it was in a garden, not a room. The ghost saw Danny this time and panicked, tried to get away, but Danny blasted it with his ecto-blast. Tucker and Sam came into view of the blood and guts and their faces paled.

"Oh my god..." Danny heard Tucker say, before the techno-geek dropped the thermos and his bag and ran to throw up. Sam stayed, staring at the mess before shaking herself out of it and grabbing the thermos. She released the catch on it, opening it up, and aimed. The octopus ghost was caught in the thermos for the second time. The halfa floated down to the ground, making sure to land in a spot not covered with body parts.

"Go take Tucker home. I'll try and clean up here" He told Sam. "Leave the police an anonymous tip or something."

"Are you sure? I doubt Tucker's feeling _that_ bad." The sounds coming from behind the bush said differently and Danny smiled in amusement.

"Go on, I'll catch you up later."

It was 5 minutes later that Danny had finally cleared away the remains of Tucker's nasty burger and was about to call the police when a loud roaring of an engine made itself known. The ghost looked up the street, seeing the FBI's sleek, black car heading his direction. He watched as it stopped and the two men got out, aiming guns at him. The short one began firing at him, which Danny easily dodged after 2 years of experience, but he still panicked and tried to placate them.

"Hey! Wait, what are you doing? Stop!" They fired more bullets at him. Obviously, they had seen the mess of blood and guts and connected him to it. The taller one edged closer and picked up Tucker's bag and Danny mentally cursed. There were a couple of new Fenton inventions in there that Danny had thought could be useful. While the shorter one continued to fire, the taller one looked through the bag and pulled out a Fenton De-ghoster (Jack really needed to get better at naming things), looking thoroughly confused with the find. Danny winced and decided it would be a good time to go. Turning his back on the two men, he flew away. He'd barely made it a few feet when something whistled past him, just grazing his leg as it went. They had worked out how to use the stupid thing. The pain from the graze flared up, consuming him so much that he didn't realise he was falling till he hit the ground. The pain lasted for all of five seconds before he was up and running again. He felt dizzy and dazed and through his clouded mind, he saw he was on the street next to the one the men were at. He needed to go faster to escape them. Running was too slow. He tried to feel weightless, to get the wind to carry him, but only managed a few inches before tumbling back to the ground.

"What the..."

"Sam, stop playing with the weird things and get over here." The voice of the shorter man sounded closer than just the next street away. Danny turned around and found himself staring into angry eyes. The tall one - now known to Danny as Sam - rounded the corner, still holding onto the Fenton invention. In the split second between Sam rounding that corner and Danny coming to his senses enough to run, the ghost-kid felt for his other powers, trying anything. Ecto-blast (gone), intangibility (dead), invisibility (still very clearly opaque), and ice (melted). He could no longer feel his ghostly powers. So he ran.

"Dean! Over here!" Sam and Dean had been walking through the park's small woods for about an hour, searching for the ghost-boy. They both had one of the Fenton guns each. Sam still had the De-Ghoster, but Dean had a normal ecto-gun. They had been shouting each other every time they thought they saw the glow of his eyes or the aura of his body. Each time it had turned out to be just another wild animal. They were getting too close to Danny. It was only a matter of time before one of their calls was not a false alarm. He hid behind the thick trunk of a young tree. Young enough to have not grown too knobbly, but old enough to have a rather thick trunk. His breathing was ragged from the run, but the two men had barely been out of breath. That meant they had more stamina than him, meaning he would not last as long as them if it came to a fight. They also had weapons, while he was powerless. The only thing he could do was either surrender and hope they would stop shooting long enough to listen to him, or run through the trees, hoping they wouldn't see him.

Okay, so he had assessed his options. He should probably wonder about his powerless state. It took longer than it should have done to work it out. The De-Ghoster blast had grazed his leg. The gun was meant to stop a ghost's powers completely. Not only stop them from firing ecto-blasts and the other usual stuff, but make their ectoplasm unstable enough to allow a quick capture in the Thermos. It was sort of like a more violent version of the Plasmius Maximus. If the blast had hit him full on, Danny guessed that he would have immediately become human, giving away his secret. As it was, the graze had only short-circuited his powers for a short while, including his ability to switch between ghost and human as he had found out when he first entered the trees.

He stiffened as he heard a crack of twigs not too far away. Someone was close.

"Here, ghostie ghostie ghostie. Come out, come out where ever you are." The gentle, taunting tone of the voice belonged to the shorter one - Dean. Danny closed his eyes and made a split-second decision. Hoping that these guys were of the ask first, shoot later kind (previous actions had said that they weren't), he stepped out from behind his tree, hands in the air.

"Alright! Alright, I surrender! Just don't shoot me anymore!"

"Why should we stop?" Sam had heard Danny's voice and had started walking over to them, gun trained on Danny. Dean was glaring at him. Danny looked him straight in the eyes as he answered.

"Because A) those things could do some serious damage to me. And B)" he said hurriedly as Dean lifted his eyebrows as though that would be a plus "I'm totally innocent in all this! I even caught the ghost responsible for the killings... twice!"

"Oh, yeah?" Sam had reached them and had joined in the conversation. Well... at least they weren't shooting him. "If you're innocent, then why did you run?"

"Because you were shooting at me! What would you do if two full-grown men were shooting at you when you were only 16?" Dean shrugged.

"Shoot 'em back." Danny paused in shock for a moment as he took those words in. As he looked the two men up and down, he snorted and shook his head.

"Yeah, I can see that actually." There was a strange tingling sensation in his fingertips, slowly spreading into his hands as he spoke. "Look, I just wanna get home and find out who let the nasty thing out of the Thermos and get on with my life."

"Life?" Sam furrowed his brow in confusion.

"Existence. Whatever." The tingling was spreading faster, now up to his elbows. Danny tried building an ecto-blast in his hand without the two men seeing and was rewarded with the familiar sensation of power. He warily eyed the guns still trained on him, feeling thankful that they had decided to not shoot him yet.

"First you can answer some questions." Dean snarled "Like, what exactly are you?" Danny snorted in amusement.

"Eeer, a ghost? I would've thought that was obvious."

"Ghosts can't do what you do. They can't fly or whatever else you do."

"Obviously, you're new to Amity."

"Huh?"

"Look, just go ask the Fentons. I'm not a threat and they can tell you about ghosts."

"We know everything we need to about ghosts." Dean lowered the ecto-gun slightly and Sam followed suit. "Since you're being so chatty, how about telling us where your bones are and we'll be on our way." Their hands dropped to their sides, guns no longer pointing at Danny. The halfa sighed with relief, until his brain caught up with their words.

"M-my bones?!" He practically squeaked in surprise. "What the hell do you want my _bones_ for?"

"Remains then." The tingling was growing stronger, flooding from his arms into his stomach, slowly.

"I don't have any remains!" He started backing away from the two men, who were obviously not all there in the head "Look, I just need to get back home to deal with the other ghost and check on my friends. So... let's part ways as unlikely friends, yeah?" _Almost there, _the tingling had almost filled his stomach, warming him thoroughly, _come on._ The two fake agents immediately brought their stolen weapons back up again.

"No way, you're not going anywhere, kid." Dean fired and Danny almost wept with relief when the blast went through him instead of hitting him. He made himself tangible again, to the great surprise of Dean and Sam.

"How...?" Sam was staring at him with confusion and curiosity. Dean, however, fired again. This time Danny went invisible and began to run, getting steadily faster until he lifted his feet off the ground and flew off. Choking his tears back in relief, he landed in front of his home, turned human and walked back in.

Sam and Tucker were waiting for him in the living room. The TV was turned on, showing some old cop show that nobody watched anymore. He heard the familiar crashes and bangs coming from the direction of the basement and sighed. His two friends turned to look at him as he walked over to them, worry in their eyes.

"You took your time." Sam's eyes were boring into his, demanding an explanation.

"Sorry... ran into some trouble. Nothing I couldn't handle." He looked towards Tucker "Your bag may be lost forever though." The two were silent as they waited for an explanation. Danny sighed and was about to open his mouth when the memorable purr of a car made itself known. The engine cut off and the three were silent as someone got out of the car. A few seconds later, someone knocked on the door.


End file.
